Everything Else Is Borrowed
Best laid plans. This week was supposed to be quite busy. By my standards. I had planned to go to the playground on Monday, then a visit from the sight central’s IT department on Tuesday, then hospital checkup today and cane training tomorrow. But the playground trip was canceled because of bad weather. And we missed our ride to the hospital today so we couldn’t make our appointment. And then I got a message from Ulla, the cane trainer, saying that she was going home sick today and not expecting to be well by tomorrow so we’d have to postpone the session. Oh well. I’m going to go to the playground tomorrow instead (if the weather behaves. There have been reports of snow, would you believe it). And furthermore mama will make winter’s first soup on Sunday, so I will be enjoying that a lot.
But the only thing that has gone quite according to plan is the IT visit. That went quite well, although I’m not sure how much I’ll really benifit from it. It was more stuff that will help me if my eyesight gets worse again. The main thing I got was a program called ZoomText. It’s a zoom program. Surprisingly. But it doesn’t zoom text actually, it zoomes the whole screen. And it does other smart, little things as well. You can change colours and sizes and markers and pointers and so on. I haven’t messed around with it much yet, so I’m not sure how useful it will be exactly. But I am right now running with a screen resolution of 1280×720 instead of the 800×600 I had been using for months. And it seems to be working. I might be able to use this resolution. Using the zoom when needed. I have usually been using Firefox to zoom text, but that isn’t so handy always. For example when reading usenet. Because if you zoom the text too much then the layout gets messed up and it gets unreadable. I’m hoping ZoomText will work better with that. It works better with livejournal. So it does some good, the program. And it will be interesting to experiment with all the features. The screen reader feature isn’t installed though. Apparently it’s a little complicated to use, and since I don’t really need it right now there is no reason to mess around with it. But if my eyesight does get worse then they will come and install it and teach me to use it.
I will also be getting a program that will teach me the 10 finger system of typing. That would also come in handy if my eyesight gets worse. If I can’t see they keyoard at all or see what I’m typing, then it will be necessary to srill be able to type. So hopefully I’ll be able to learn that. I can do it somewhat already, so with proper lessons it should be possible.
But that’s it. We’ll see how much I can get out of ZoomText. If I can run with a higher resolution and use some websites that I couldn’t really before then that would be quite good, yes. All the help I can get is good.
And hopefully I’ll get to see the goats tomorrow. Fingers crossed.
November 5th, 2009 at 1:05
I had one year of typing in high school. That was about 800 years ago. We did practice on manual typewriters, then electric ones. That was one course I’ve used all throughout my life. (Not like some school classes I took!)
Hay, hay. If you see the goats, get some goat POO! You could put it in a plastic bag and carry it around with you. If you got stopped, you could always say you had some really old chocolate covered raisins! hee, hee
I can’t really believe you don’t already know the 10 finger way of typing. It will really speed up writing your blogs and give you more confidence that you are really spelling/writing words correctly.
Now you need a “spell check” that lets you know if a word is wrong. Maybe a slight electric shock. Just kidding! Maybe there is a program that could read aloud what you had written.
Any sign of the neighbors yet? Would be nice to have some good neighbors around.
Does your doctor suggest you getting a seasonal flu shot or even the H1N1 shot? My husband and I got our seasonal flu shot in Sept.
We aren’t in the high risk group for the H1N1 shot anyway, but it is hard to get right now. I think they’re in the process of getting more vaccine produced shortly.
We had a snow flake or two the second weekend of October. No accumulation and if you had your eyes closed for a second, you might have missed the occasional flake.
We’ve had some dry weather so the farmers are all getting in their crops of corn and soybeans. Every day more and more fields are getting harvested. Of course that has the deer moving around as their cover is rapidly disappearing.
November 5th, 2009 at 20:54
I still say you should insist a mega wide screen plasma tv with sorround sound is the best possible solution to your need for bigger text and bigger pictures! ;)
November 6th, 2009 at 20:09
Debster – I have had a little bit of typing, but didn’t take it seriously at the time. I can sort of do it, as long as my fingers are positioned correctly. I just have no idea if my fingers are positioned correctly or not. Not until I see what I’m typing. I need to learn where to keep my fingers and such. But we’ll see how it goes.
Well, no raisins for me tonight!
I used to be my own spell check. But now reading back my own blog after writing is so stressful that I skip it. And leave the typos. Oh well. I hope you guys can deal with them.
I have never gotten flu shots before, and so far no recommendations from my doc. I’m not worried.
I haven’t seen the neighbours. But I still hear drilling sounds from in there every now and then. I’m not sure if they have moved in completely or if they’re making preparations still. But since I don’t exactly go out much I don’t expect to be running into them a lot anyway.
Desiree – Hehe. Yes, I wonder what they’d say to that. But the thing is that a huge screen wouldn’t actually work well with the computer. The IT guy said so as well. Mine is a 22″. If you go much bigger than that then it becomes hard to use anyway, you’d have to move your head around a lot as you couldn’t focus on the entire screen at once. So no dice.